Unwinding
by alyssss
Summary: Written (I have to say) midway through the first book, so I've really not had much reference in terms of this and it's probably very inaccurate. It's... kind of gory, but hopefully I've managed to put myself into the mind of an unwind. This is essentially a graphic description of the process of an unwinding- from the Unwound. T for Gore. One-shot.


Unwind

The needle jabs my chest, sending a short and sharp pain stabbing through me. "That's it, that's all the pain you'll be feeling." A surgeon smiles kindly into my face, her mask covering her mouth but her eyes showing all the emotion of her beliefs. "It's not death; you continue to live… just not all together." They don't even ask me my name, just smile sickeningly into my face and wait for the drugs to kick in.

Slowly, gradually, my weight begins to drift away. My mind goes fuzzy and my legs, my torso, my arms, they all feel heavy but light, like they weigh a tonne but are not really there. There's this thought in the back of my head, letting me know that soon they really won't be there, but the fuzziness pushes it away and soon, I'm smiling up into the faces of the grinning surgeons, my naked body on show for them to examine, prod and slice like an animal.

"There we go!" The female smiles down at me, lifts my wrist and drops it back onto the table. I feel her touch me, feel it as it rises through the stuffy air above me, but feel no pain as it slams back onto the cool metal desk. "That's great." She turns to her senior, the man standing at the foot of the table. "We're ready to start."

The mask slips down my face and my eyes follow its slow descent from over my nose. When my eyelids touch closed, they feel so heavy I can barely bring myself to open them again. It's nothing more than intense, morbid curiosity that compels me to open them again, to look down at the body that will soon no longer be mine and watch as the two surgeons work together to completely dismantle me.

"Oops!" The woman, who is far too cheery for someone given the job of consistently murdering helpless teens, grabs the mask with her gloved hand and puts it back up, almost over my eyes, securing it to my face with tape. She pulls up a stool and sits next to me as the other surgeon comes in and scrubs up. "Now, this…" She taps one of the chest tubes and rests her face on her hands. "Is slowly replacing your blood with an oxygen-carrying solution, similar to blood but not quite the same. This other one," She taps the other tube. "Is what takes the blood from your body. We're basically replacing all of your blood with this liquid to make sure that nothing's wasted."

"Why are you telling me this?" I mumble from behind the mask, gazing mistily into her excited eyes.

"It's a legal requirement- you've got a good three hours of this left to go, sweetie. Now, don't you drift off. If you do, I've got to wake you up again! And it's so much harder to wake up once you let yourself go." She traces a line on my arm as the surgeons step up to the bench, stripping protective plastic packaging from a number of sharp metal instruments. "First off, they'll start off by removing each of your limbs- to be shipped across the country to people who need them."

_Because apparently I don't._

One surgeon stands on each side of the bench, and I watch through bleary eyes as they slice through the skin and fat and muscle at the top of each leg, leaving my torso like an arrow pointing towards the door. They saw away at the bones, and tears leak from deep within me as they lift my limp legs away from me, the grey blood-replacement dripping onto the floor. My legs rest on the other bench, against the wall, ready to be packaged by the waiting nurses, ready to be removed and shipped.

The surgeons clamp off the veins and arteries lying loose at the end of my body and I close my eyes for a split second, breathing deeply and preparing myself for the next moment.

The next set of faces to lean over me are different again, belonging to two different surgeons. The procedure is the same, in which they saw away at my arms and lift them away from my body, carrying them away across the room.

Being nothing more than a torso and a head is the weirdest feeling in the world. You feel so much lighter but heavier at the same time, so vulnerable yet like you could just fly away without ever having to think about returning ever again.

The next lot of surgeons come in, and the accompanying nurse stroked my juddering chin and reassures me, yet again, that I won't feel anything. "It wasn't too bad, was it? Just think about all the people whose lives will be made better by your contribution!" I suppress a sob, trying to flex my fingers and toes and feeling overwhelmed with hopelessness as the irreversibility of everything sinks in. This is it. I'm going to die.

I watch the screen above my head as the new surgeon slices a gash from below the support tubes to my groin, drawing a huge cross on my torso, butchering the perfect white skin like mere meat. The cuts immediately blossom with grey, swabbed away by the nurse. Together, the staff pull back my skin, revealing me in all my glory. And despite the desperation of my lungs, expanding and contracting with each panicked break, despite the gross squirming of my various organs, I am overwhelmed by the beauty of it all.

A huge rectangular frame is fit into the gap in my torso, holding the rectangle open for access. One by one, the organs are removed. The only ones they leave are my lungs, my heart. Those are the only one's I'll need now.

"Not long left, just a few more minutes, really." The nurse at my side strokes my cheek once more and moves in close to whisper softly in my ear. "Soon, you won't be able to speak. You'll feel some tugging, generally unpleasant, but it'll soon be over. Then, you'll go blind, you won't be able to see, to blink, but it'll be okay. Then your ears and hair, but you'll be fine, you won't notice anything. You'll just be left with thoughts by this point, thoughts and memories. And then we'll remove your hair, drill into your skull and remove your brain. And by that point, we can remove these tubes and get at your heart and lungs, take out your ribs and ship them off too, get you all done and off helping people you really need you."

I look up at the screen again, hanging above my head. The person on the table isn't a person, isn't me. Missing from the top of my thighs downwards, from my shoulders outwards. Every part of me is missing, my kidneys and liver and colon. All those squishy squirmy things I saw just a few hours ago, all gone. I wonder how I'm still alive, until I notice the clear tubes winding their way out of my body, draining me of every last ounce of life.

It's not murder.

It's torture.

I just want it over with.

I watch in the screen as the surgeon digs his scalpel into my neck and draws it across with expert precision, slicing through my skin as though it was butter. He peels back the wrappings and digs into my throat with his hands. I see his face, beads of concentration formed on his forehead, and watch in the screen beyond as he hacks away at everything I have left. Somehow it all just pulls out, and then everything is gone. My mouth is empty of teeth and tongue, there is nothing left in my throat but a clear plastic tube connecting my nose to my lungs, just so I can keep watching this butchering.

But none of that matters anymore, because I know that soon it will all be over, I will all be gone.

He hacks away at my face with his tools, eventually coming away with my jawbone in his grey-soaked hands. The void that is my body is disgusting, with nothing but gore left. I have a nose and eyes, and my brain is, for the moment, intact. But everything else, barring my heart and lungs, is useless. I glance across the room and see a stack of coolers, what remains of me. I get the urge to gulp, but there is nothing there for me to gulp with, nowhere for the saliva to go.

The surgeon approaches me with what looks like a very sharp ice-cream scoop and the notion almost makes me laugh- if I were capable of doing even that by now. He covers one of my eyes with it, then scoops it around. While he moves across the room, I feast my remaining eye on what is left of my body, and am somewhat thankful this is almost over.

Very soon, I feel my scalp sliced from the top of my skull, my ears pulled from the sides of my face and a grinding saw dug into my skull. The vibrations shake my bones and I still wonder how these people could look at what remains of me and feel okay with this.

There's no warning, no way for me to know what happens.

All I can do is wait until it en-


End file.
